Amanda Shaw
Love at 24
And that’s it: the ear attuned
to silences, a locked canal
leading to the throat. Sore,
I try to speak, it just gets
worse. But also, sometimes, soaring—
a vision of when the love was new,
dropped in my path. Late
to school, unable to walk
past a broken bird; looking
for a shoebox, anything
to keep alive what’s going
to dwindle to oblivion. And I
was happy. It’s the original
pathetic fallacy. Wings break;
birds die; a decade later
I’m waking up to I’d do you
in a houseboat. Or have you do me—
Change of subject. He wishes
he could be funny
in the deep way, not so foolish,
and I think he is; he makes
me laugh. Saddest thing in the world,
to fail to laugh
when someone you love
thinks a joke is really funny. Sad,
but funny, like falling out of the boat
that was going to take us
back. Was going to call, forgot.
Didn’t want to? Memory recalls
the phone quiet, recalls
the inflamed throat. Who knows
what I’d have said? Instead,
I kept myself from telling him
the saddest funny thing I read today,
a doctor repeating a man’s last words:
not I love you or a name on his lips
but a rasp, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.”
My love, today I looked for houseboats,
which can float or move slowly
downriver via canals. They can go far
but not very fast; most canals
don’t get that deep. You’ll get much further
flying, which we’d have to do
if we want to see each other
and there’s nowhere left
to land: it’s one deep thing
we never have to say. How we both love
water, though; running, sluicing,
shining; even brine. Once we needed it
so badly, sitting in the car
after years apart, we had to stop
and I drank
that big gulp in one long swallow
and still wanted more.
Love at 48
That boy and I will never clean glass
in the master bath, fully clothed, the dirt
of potted plants floating
at my callused feet. We’ll never commiserate
at soap-scum’s accumulation
on the outside of the doors. Lime for scurvy,
lime in milk, he galvanized
the follicles of my abdomen, we ate
Galapagos turtles, soup spooned
from the shells
of their boiled bodies. We ignored
extinction.
This weekend, the toilet is leaking, source
unknown. That boy
has never returned from the hardware store
with a liquid whose enzymes delight me.
Amanda Shaw
Amanda Shaw set out into the world of adulthood, like most of us, with a vague idea of what was ahead. Since college she has lived in six different states and four countries. After 20+ years of teaching and editing, she received her MFA in January 2020. She became a caretaker for her mother three years ago, while continuing work as a freelance editor and teacher in various official and non-official capacities. She currently divides her time between New Hampshire, where she was born, and Washington, D.C. Her upcoming collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, is due out from Lily Poetry Review Books in March 2024.